I won last weekend's auction of a VP100 ($235) in an oddball colour - Brushed Silver/Charcoal Grill that exactly matches my silver Sony Stand. Thanks to all for not trying to outbid me, ha! Shipped Monday & was out here on Friday - wow!

This is my post over at AVS that I included in tha Axiom Owners' Thread to provide something more than the normal negativity over there. I've actually had some nice replies:

I finally got my VP100 carton away from my cats & unpacked it First impressions are that it's much heavier than I expected, fit & finish (B Stock) is excellent & the Brushed Silver with Charcoal Grill matches beautifully with my stand. In my darkened room, it disappears visually.

I set it up on the lowest shelf (3" off the floor) in its slot in my space-challenged stand in the elevated (pointed up slightly) configuration so that it is aimed nicely at the listeners' head.

In order to give it a bit of a workout before calibrating, my wife & I watched the latest 'The Three Musketeers' Blu Ray - the one with the airships. Great, dynamic (but not overdone) soundtrack with lots of dialogue, explosions & wonderful orchestral works throughout. Even without calibration, the VP100 performed seamlessly & admirably. Dialogue was natural & clean. Most importantly, there was no 'What did he say?' from my wife who was seated 30 degrees off center.

After the movie, I ran successfully the 6-position Audyssey calibration, I then listened to various pink noise & multi-channel sweeps at -10 Db (our normal listening level) from my old Avia HT Test DVD. Timbre matching was good, although slightly different from the M22s during single speaker tests, probably because the L & Rs (not toed in) are somewhat off axis from my sweet spot. Interestingly, the pink noise signal that rotates around the room encompassing all speakers in sequence revealed virtually no mismatches between the L, C & R. From the slight differences that I heard with the single speaker signals, it was surprisingly seamless when panning across the front. After learning so much here at AVS wrt nasties that can arise from horizontal CCs, I slid my butt back & forth along my main couch that encompasses up to 10 degrees off axis. No change in pink noise sound there; however, as expected, there was some difference evident out at the 30 degree off center, but nothing overly significant nor detrimental that I could tell.

So, this initial trial run with the movie revealed that there were no chesty male voices, boxiness nor any phasey type sounds - so my setup seems to be quite reasonable & hopefully is now nicely tweaked after calibration.

After the calibration, I took the opportunity to run a low freq test sweep at -10 Db to see what my two modest 10" Velodyne subs were doing. They started dropping off around 27Hz & finally went silent at 23Hz; however, interestingly several things in the room were still happily reacting & buzzing down to 20 Hz where the Avia test signal terminated.

I'm more than satisfied and that's what it's all about....

PS - In addition to 'The Three Musketeers', I've now run 'U-571' & 'Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life', all without any horizontal CC nasties showing up.

Here is my 'U-571' review wrt the VP100:

I played U-571 on my calibrated system this afternoon to give all of the speakers a good workout. As everyone knows, this is a brutal, dynamic soundtrack that was most impressive even at -10 DB. I thought that my surround QS4s were gonna come off the walls during the depth charge sequences. I liked it all but my cats didn't, ha!

The VP100 worked well, although some dialogue was overpowered occasionally by the carnage going on inside the sub - almost too much happening in the mix at times.

Interestingly, 'Tomb Raider' DVD was recorded at an overall lower level from most other movies. I had to crank it up to -5 Db from my normal -10 Db.

With all of the knowledge about CC speakers that I gained over at AVS, I was reluctant to go with the MTM design, because it is in fact is a compromise.

I was fortunate to have 2 vintage Sony CCs that I was able to experiment with in my room by checking (aurally) for off-axis response & sound degradation (comb filtering), etc; however, I found that there were no significant detrimental effects with this design in my room. Therefore, when this VP100 came up on auction at such a good price in a compatible colour, I jumped on it.

While the nasty effects of certain horizontal CC speaker designs are real & measureable, I believe that in most setups in the real world that these effects are often minimal & go unnoticed by most people.

According to the chapter on The Audibility of Acoustical Interference - Comb Filtering in Tooles book this is partially true. He also gets into that it can be detrimental to loudspeaker reproduction as well. It's certainly a complicated topic.

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I’m armed and I’m drinking. You don’t want to listen to advice from me, amigo.

Comb filtering to some is worse than the plague & of course seems to be prevalent in horizontal speakers. From what I understand in the worst cases, it can produce a phasey effect type sound. I know what 'out of phase' speakers sound like, but I experienced none of that in my 3 MTM CC speakers in my room. If it is there, it certainly is not very audible.

Based on my experiments in my HT room, I think that some of this stuff is somewhat overblown & unnecessarily fretted about, although I'm sure that there are some setups that can be nasty enough to drive a listener crazy. Thankfully, it's not happening to me.

The VP100 is a perfect match for my modest Axiom HT system & I like it...

Perhaps I misunderstood what comb filtering is. What do you call it when you walk across the room, playing a single tone, and you can hear the volume go up and down. Also measurable with a sound meter. If you stay in one place, the tone is constant, but moving just an inch one way or the other causes the volume to change. Walking at a slow steady pace is like a ripple effect.

Perhaps I misunderstood what comb filtering is. What do you call it when you walk across the room, playing a single tone, and you can hear the volume go up and down. Also measurable with a sound meter. If you stay in one place, the tone is constant, but moving just an inch one way or the other causes the volume to change. Walking at a slow steady pace is like a ripple effect.

Yeah. Was this when you had "your wall of speakers" hooked in series with each other? If so it could have been the bad acoustical interference which why it was so noticeable with the test tones.

_________________________
I’m armed and I’m drinking. You don’t want to listen to advice from me, amigo.

There are a couple interesting things about the effect I demonstrated there. If you listen to it in headphones, you still hear the spaciousness, but now it's actually happening in your mind, not actual phase cancellation in the air. If you happen to have the ability to mix both channels together and play them through one speaker, the effect completely disappears, it goes back to sounding like the original mono (the comb filtering on each channel is 180 degrees with one another).